IncreaseWKDUsage2021 bachelor thesis

Christoph Klassen is writing his bachelor thesis (at Intevation) about how usage of WKD can be furthered. Bernhard Reiter does the mentoring, see gnupg-devel@ for discussion and for contacting Christoph or Bernhard.

Started at 2021-10

Goal

WKD is easy to implement and brings the advantage of good usability. Because of that it is desirable to spread it and increase its usage. The question is how to do that and which is the best way. More concrete: Which measures fit best to spread the WKD standard. This measures are taken from the area of software engineering and include documentation, testing and implementation. They will be applied to different products that are Free Software.

Difficulty

It is necessary to evaluate the success of different measures to tell which one was the most effective one. It is not possible to track users while using their products, because one main promise of the products is to protect users privacy. So there have to be other ways to measure the success. One idea is to log the WKD calls on a server, which has much traffic. Please contact Bernhard or Christoph when you have these possibilities or know someone who could do this service. It would be very helpful!
This idea would help to evaluate the success of all measures overall. Additionally, it would be of great value, if there would be a way to differentiate between the measures. Maybe the statistics could show a correlation between measures and increase of WKD calls.

Criterions to evaluate the state of products (Draft)

To evaluate how far WKD is integrated and how easy it is to use WKD in different products, the questions in the list below will be answered. If the answer is positive a product gets the amount of points that is shown in brackets. The maximal possible amount of points is 14.

Are the maintainers familiar with WKD?/ Did the maintainers hear about WKD? (1)
Are the maintainers convinced of WKD? (1)
Is WKD implemented already (2)
- If not: Is it planned to implement WKD? (1)
Is it documented that WKD is used in the product? (1)
Is WKD enabled by default? (5)
- If not:
  - Is it documented how to enable WKD? (1)
  - How easy is it to enable WKD? (max. 3)
Is WKD used automatically? (2)
Is WKD used when composing emails? (1)
Is WKD used when reading emails? (1)

State of products and progress

Here it will be described what state different products had at the beginning of the work and what measures were taken to increase the usage of WKD.

Mailvelope

Previous state (analyzed version 4.4.1)

Does use WKD
The implementation is not up-to-date since it doesn't contain the advanced method
There is an issue for the advanced method on Github: https://github.com/mailvelope/mailvelope/issues/774

Measures

As part of this work a branch was created to implement the advanced method: https://github.com/c8k/mailvelope

Claws Mail

Previous state (analyzed version 3.18.0)

Integrated WKD since version 3.18.0 / 4.0.0
How to get a key via WKD:
- At the right side of an opened email is a toolbar with a button that contains a key icon (see Screenshot attachment:wkd_claws_mail.png
- A click on it opens a window where the key of the belonging email address can be fetched (via key server or WKD)

Measures

Request: In the compose window users can right-click on an email address to open a context menu, where they can e.g. add this address to their address book. To give users the possibility to retrieve keys of email addresses, from which they didn't receive an email yet, it was requested to implement another action to do just that. Optionally, this action could be shown only, if the user enabled a privacy system.
Request: Automatically enable a privacy system as soon as an user adds one, when loading a plugin.

FairEmail/ K9Mail

Previous state

Use OpenKeyChain to retrieve keys via WKD and encrypt emails
It is necessary to open OpenKeyChain to retrieve keys. This step is not possible in the GUI of the products

FairEmail

Previous state (analyzed version 1.1776)

Heuristic Evaluation of FairEmail

Measures

Requested an easier way to open the OpenKeyChain app, so users can open it from FairEmail and don't have to go to the settings of the phone to start the OpenKeyChain app there.
Reported a bug: When an encrypted mail was recieved and that mail was decrypted with FairEmail, a message appeared saying, that the mail isn't signed. But when the mail is decrypted there is an icon left of the lock icon and after a tap on it, a message appears, which tells that the signature is valid. So the first message seems to be incorrect.
Recommended to edit the UI in the compose window. There are three icons. Two of them can be interacted with and one not, but all of them have the same style (no borders, no background, same color etc.). To be more consistent it was suggested to remove the icon without function or to adjust the style of the icons, so that the one, which can't be interacted with, has a different style.

K9Mail

Previous state (analyzed version 5.806)

coming soon